318 CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. " All my successes put together since I have been upon the stage," she wrote home, " would not come near my success in London, and I only wanted some one of you here to enjoy it with me, to make it complete." She and Sallie were no longer filled with gratitude for a chance invitation to dinner. Invitations came in show- ers, and they were overrun with visitors. It soon became a joke that Miss Cushman was never in a room with less than six people. She sat to five artists, and distinguished people of all kinds overwhelmed her with attentions. " I hesitate to write even to you," she says in a letter to her mother, " the agreeable and complimentary things that are said and done to me here, for it looks monstrously like boasting. I like you to know it, but I hate to tell it to you myself." After a splendid career of success on both sides of the Atlantic, she took up her abode at Rome, returning occa- sionally to her native land. It so chanced that she was obliged to resume her Roman residence soon after the war broke out, and she deeply lamented that she was called away from her country at such a time. But she bore her share in the struggle. It is hard to imagine how she could have been spared from her post in Rome, where she was the light and consolation of the desponding little American colony. In the darkest days, when the news from home was of defeat following defeat, her faith never wavered for an instant. She was sure the Union cause would prove victorious. Her countrymen in the city called her " the Sunbeam " ; and in after days many of them confessed to having walked the streets again and again, in the mere hope of meeting her and getting a passing word of cheer. A year before this, in London, she held with her banker, Mr. Peabody, a little conversation which perhaps displays her feeling better than anything else. He told her that the
